Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian.
The US president’s grotesque theatrics on the world stage are an opportunistic distraction from his falling domestic ratings.
Of all the commandments for living under Donald Trump, the first is always this: don’t believe him. Nothing he says can be taken at face value; everything should be fed into a polygraph. Those of scrupulous courtesy can wrap it up in red ribbon, or uncork that aphorism about how the man must be taken seriously but never literally. All the same, scratch a Trump promise and underneath will glint a pretext. Scrutinise his grand plans and you find only shabby tactics.
The Manhattan Democrat turns into a Florida-dwelling Republican; the troll who demanded Barack Obama’s birth certificate will hem and haw over releasing the Epstein files. From real-estate deals to Trump University, all that this guy swears is solid gold soon settles into so much bullshit.
When the US president kidnaps the head of a foreign state and accuses him of being some kingpin of cocaine, remember how, just last month, Trump claimed his prime focus was actually fentanyl, which he termed “a weapon of mass destruction”, since it and other synthetic opioids account for nearly 70% of all drug-overdose deaths in the US.
When he claims that abducting Nicolás Maduro was strictly law enforcement, tot up the 150-plus aircraft, including Delta Force choppers, bombs and special ops troops, and see if you can’t spot a unilateral act of war. Think of the summary executions by American aircraft of at least 115 people suspected of – but not charged with or tried for – drug trafficking since September. The Atlantic reports that when footage of an airstrike was shown in Washington, one lawmaker almost vomited. Credit for such grotesque theatrics must go to the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, a heavily hair-gelled rightwinger who clearly saw in Patrick Bateman not a warning but a role model.
Any other country that did this wouldn’t receive indulgent op-eds about its “gunboat diplomacy” – it would rightly be condemned as a rogue state, and its oligarchs’ foreign assets impounded. The absence of such action is the true “Trump derangement syndrome”.
Yet in this week’s barrage of Trumpsplaining, analysts still claim to see in his actions evidence of some grand strategy. Next, we are confidently assured, the US president will annex Greenland. Yet this is not an administration that wants to colonise; instead it demands compliance. The new bosses in Venezuela are the same old bosses, the same henchmen and yes-men, only now with the No 2 running the show. This isn’t “imperialism”, not a new US protectorate nor some southern principality for son-in-law Jared, but something much cheaper and less onerous to the Oval Office: rule by remote control.
Trump certainly seemed to enjoy the military strike on Maduro’s compound, watching it on television in Mar-a-Lago and declaring it a “brilliant operation, actually”. He might well demand a box set of further such adventures faraway, especially if they aid the November midterms. But stick around and deal with the mess, the admin, the corpses? Fat chance. Democrats and Republicans alike saw how well that went in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Will Trump rule Venezuela, or Greenland? It would make a change if he ruled the US. The president is a fair way through his second term in office, yet we are still to see Trumpism in one country, let alone around the world. For all the rhetoric and locker-room bullying, Trump’s time in office has been about dismembering the government – even that vital task outsourced, to Elon Musk and his chainsaw – and setting troops on Democratic cities he doesn’t like, then blustering his way through a federal shutdown. As the economist Helen Thompson points out, even his much-touted tariffs on Chinese imports changed five times within the first six months after his inauguration. The result of all this indecision and chaos is personal approval ratings that have sunk below those of “Sleepy Joe” Biden.
At some point, such dreary domestic concerns will reassert themselves. But given how dreary they are, you can see why the Trump White House prefers talking of a new world order. The only problem is that that new world order is not new, it’s not worldwide and it’s certainly not ordered.
Let’s start with the “not new”. Maduro is hardly the first leader to be taken out by the US. Salvador Allende in Chile, João Goulart in Brazil and Manuel Noriega in Panama: their careers are vastly different but they all ended courtesy of Washington. In 2005, one Harvard paper argued: “In the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the US government has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times. That amounts to once every 28 months for an entire century.”
Those liberals shedding tears this week about the decline of something called “the rules-based order” should remember the former US secretary of state Colin Powell’s boast about how his US was “the biggest bully on the block”. What’s novel is Trump’s brazenness about making piles of money, rather than providing the usual moist-eyed pieties about bringing democracy to oppressed peoples.
Similarly, when the president ad libs about a “Donroe doctrine”, wise beards nod about how this is a Yalta-style divvying up of spheres of influence. From now on, we’re told, Pax Americana will be confined to the western hemisphere – even though just last month the US bombed Nigeria and proclaimed itself “locked and loaded” to oust Iran’s ayatollah, Ali Khamenei. Trump does deals, not doctrines. However ideological Stephen Miller and others within his administration may be, he is himself far too opportunistic to hew to a strategy.
The lack of order is obvious. The raid on Caracas broke international law and breached the US constitution, since it went ahead without congressional approval. Trump let reporters know that he tipped off a few businesspeople first, before speaking to allies on Capitol Hill. And his talk of raiding Venezuela’s huge reserves of oil are just fantasy. Crude prices are around their lowest in five years, depriving major oil companies of the financial incentive to go drilling in the vast and remote Orinoco Belt. The amount of investment needed to tap significant Venezuela oil is estimated to be above that spent last year by all major US oil firms put together.
This is neither a new world order nor a new imperialism. These are old terms from the old books, that neither take into account how American capitalism has changed nor just who Trump is working with. As I have written before, his is a network of buccaneers and oligarchs, of AI billionaires, crypto bros and shadow bankers. It is not a regime but a chaotic grab at resources and contracts. In many ways this is a more unsettling and unsettled picture, but it is also one that can be more robustly resisted – if European leaders actually want to try.
